From BBC News:
Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests.
The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists.
Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World.
The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads.
(snip)
“It’s telling us that these records probably exist and that many remain to be found. If we can decode their content, these earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilisation will speak to us today.”
Chance find
The slab has been dated to the early first millennium BC. It appears to have been made by the Olmec civilisation of Mesoamerica, a geographical region located between the Sinaloa River valley in northern Mexico and the Gulf of Fonseca south of El Salvador.
(snip)
The Olmecs appeared on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico around 1,200 BC. They are known to have carved glyphs – a symbolic figure or character that stands for a letter, sound, or word – since around 900 BC, but scholars are divided over whether this can be classified as true writing.
The stone slab, named the “Cascajal block”, was first uncovered by road builders digging up an ancient mound at Cascajal, outside San Lorenzo, in the late 1990s.
It weighs about 12kg (26lbs) and measures 36cm (14in) in length, 21cm (8in) in width and 13cm (5in) in thickness. Its text consists of 62 signs, some of which are repeated up to four times.
(snip)
The team says the text “conforms to all expectations of writing” because of its distinct elements, patterns of sequencing, and consistent reading order.
Commenting on the discovery, Mary Pohl, of Florida State University in Tallahassee, said she believed the authors had made a good case.
“I think it’s a hugely important and symbolic find,” she told the BBC News website. “It’s new and further evidence that [the Olmecs] had writing and had text.”
The block was carved from precious serpentine rock, suggesting it was probably a holy object used by high orders of society for some kind of ritual activity, she said.
They give an image to part of the tablet and a link to the rest.
I wonder what it says. If it were written on special stone, then it wasn’t a romance novel. Perhaps it was a priest’s diary and says nothing more than “Nothing special happened today.”
But perhaps it is a ritual or the history of a temple. Perhaps someday the Olmec Rosetta Stone will be found.
Linkage from Wikipedia:
Olmec
Written Language
History of Writing
Rosetta Stone